back to article Disaggregated hyperconvergence thinks storage outside the box

If you thought hyper-convergence is all about putting everything in one box, think again: some users are now asking for disaggregated hyper-convergence that sees the storage put back out on the network. So says Michael Hay, Hitachi Data Systems' (HDS') veep and chief engineer, who tells The Register he's seeing customers who …

  1. Nate Amsden

    not for mainstream applications?

    So all of the HDS VSP customers etc are running nothing but things like hadoop on their storage systems?

    Makes no sense to me.

    None of my VM hosts have storage at all, they even boot from SAN.

    I would think in most cases things like Hadoop would be using local storage, I'm not in the hadoop realm but have only personally head of one company that used network storage for hadoop over the years(ironically enough it was HDS storage, with BlueArc I think).

    1. fishyuk

      Re: not for mainstream applications?

      Hi Nate, the work has already been done to allow async infrastructure with storage separate to the compute for Hadoop. Its used in the HPE BDRA (http://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA6-3295ENW.pdf) . Avoids the common problem of a customer buying 100s of 2U rackmounts and realising their ratios are not matched to the use case (not enough CPU for instance).

      Cheers, Alex

  2. myxiplx2

    Gridstore already does this

    Gridstore can already do this, it's pretty low overhead in the first place (well under 3% overhead in an intensive test), so its not often needed, but you can also install the client on external systems and allow them to access the storage of the hyper-converged system.

    It's a standard feature of the architecture, and you still get all the benefits you would with a normal hyper-converged system, including simplified management, scalability, and end-to-end QoS.

  3. jake Silver badge

    Management & marketing are ...

    ... really flailing, aren't they? They have no clue about technology, and are inventing terminology out of the whole cloth to justify their existence to the even more clueless shareholders.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Management & marketing are ...

      Seems like. When their terminology does more to obfuscate than explain, it's pretty obvious things are well off the rails.

      I was having enough trouble figuring out what "hyper convergence" actually means, for starters. Now there are "disaggregated" and (presumably) "aggregated" flavors of whatever it is?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Management & marketing are ...

      Disclaimer - HDS Employee

      What have you smoked dude ? Or just missing your amnesia pills.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: Management & marketing are ...

        "What have you smoked dude ?"

        Uh ... nothing[0]. But I haven't drunk the cool-aid, either.

        [0] To be perfectly honest, I just pulled about sixty pounds of lamb bacon[1] out of the little smoke house.

        [1] Streaky bacon, to be honest ... Nobody wants lamb-belly around Easter. Waste-not, want-not.

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